The links below provide access to the heart of Jerripedia's family history information

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families are now included, as of 8 February 2018

Pages revised

In July 2017 we completed the major task of updating all our family pages, redesigning and revising each page, adding up-to-date lists of baptisms, to include those records released at the beginning of the year, and more pictures and other content. In early September we completed the addition of Great War service records and lists of family wills to existing pages. In December we completed nearly 140 new pages added over the course of the year, each with derivation, early records, links to baptism and Occupation record listings, family trees, wills and gravestones.

We then added a further 80 pages, which are the only ones now tagged NEW . All the new family pages now contain basic information on derivation, early records, baptisms, wills and gravestones. Family trees and further records will be added to each of them over the coming weeks.

Great War records

The addition of service records required a considerable amount of research: as well as expanding and correcting, where necessary, the records in the official Rolls of Honour and Service, we have created links to Jerripedia family trees and relevant articles on the site.

The inclusion of these records in Jerripedia is of considerable value to researchers because, spanning a period of five years in the wake of the last available census (1911), they provide a bridge across a generation.

Our lists of those who served in the forces during the Great War and those who lost their lives in the conflict are based on the official Rolls of Honour and Service produced by the States of Jersey in 1919, updated on the website of the Channel Islands Great War Study Group, with additions and corrections uncovered by our own research.

Baptism listings

The lists of baptisms for each family have been updated to include the new records released in 2017 and, because these now duplicate the majority of records of central registrations of births from 1842 onwards, only baptisms are included in the updated family page lists. If baptisms and births for a family were previously shown on separate pages, the link to the birth records page has been retained. If you are looking for an ancestor who might not have been baptised, or was baptised in a non-Church of England church, you will find birth records for all parishes except St Helier in our associated database. St Helier births are now included in the parish page under Family records. Birth records do not give dates of birth (only a range of dates), and no information on parents.

Information wanted

Where details are lacking we are always pleased to hear from those of you who are researching these families for your own trees and whose knowledge is more extensive than ours. To discuss new material, or to suggest any corrections that may be needed on existing pages, please send an email to editcontact@theislandwiki.org, using Jerripedia as the subject of your email.

We recognise that the existing list of family names is not exhaustive and will continue to add more. If you think a particular family is missing and should be added to the list, please let us know. The basic criterion for inclusion is that the family page should link to at least one family tree of three generations or more, with strong Jersey connections.

We are interested in families which arrived in Jersey in the second half of the 20th century and are now into their third generation. This particularly includes families originating in France and Portugal. We are conscious that the latter, many of which have now been present in Jersey for three or more generations, are under-represented in our pages and would welcome any assistance which can be given to put this right.

If researchers have information which can take trees for these families back several generations in the places they originated, that will prove of enormous value to family historians today and in the future, and help build up a new chapter of Jersey's immigrant families.

And beware that just because a Jersey's ancestor's name sounds French, does not mean that it is necessarily a long-established island surname, or even originates in France. Read The perils of French sounding names.

Jersey was an island where the majority of the population spoke Jèrriais and/or French until well into the 19th century. Some country families did not have English as their main language until the late 20th century and the business of the States and publication of its laws were in French until early in that century. Consequently, the vast majority of children born in the island were given French personal names to go with their, largely, French surnames. This only began to change in the 19th century. Wherever possible the members of the family trees in this section of Jerripedia are shown with the names they were baptised with, but where these trees have been copied in their entirety from trees published elsewhere, or downloaded from family tree software packages, it is possible that anglicised versions of the correct French names will have been used.

Family trees

Included in the family pages are links to all Jerripedia's family trees for that family. We try to keep these links up-to-date but if trees have been added recently by contributors to the site it is possible that some indexes will not be fully updated. You can also check our Index of all family trees, which is always the first index we update, to see if there are any recently added trees not yet linked from a particular family page.

Wills and gravestones

The family pages contain images of gravestones in a number of Jersey cemeteries. The project to photograph these stones is not yet complete and about two-thirds of cemeteries are covered at present.

Wills from 1666 to 1948 are available on the Jersey Heritage website. By visiting the archive site it is possible to view a copy of each will. You will have to subscribe to the Archive's online service to do this. In addition to lists of wills on each family page, we have a full A-Z index for nearly 15,000 wills in the Archive collection.